Just trying to make my way in language, love, and law

Menu

Immoveable Type

Obviously, I tried to do something clever with the title of this, my first blog. Perhaps posterity and future hindsight will tell me if I succeeded. At some point I’m going to have to do a smug post telling everyone how the title should be read and interpreted. For now, I’m too bloody terrified. What have I done?!

Dinosaur that I increasingly find myself to be, I’m not entirely a stranger to having a presence online. In days of yore when your other online presence options were Usenet groups and IRC rooms, I had a livejournal thingie that’s probably still floating around somewhere. So I could even be considered an interblag pioneer by the standards of today’s web-wise children.

That is to say, I understand (I think) the conventions of and desire to publish online. Back then, I loved the affirmation, I loved the opportunity to engage with utter strangers who stumbled across my patch, and I probably loved internet fights with assholes who fell afoul of my almighty admin powers to delete comments. To some extent you still see this kind of behaviour on whatever passes for an online presence these days.

But surely that can’t be my motivation for starting a fancy new blog now, at my age. If not for aggrandisement, I must assume that my opaque-to-myself motivation must have something to do with either political or aesthetic urges, then. God help us all.

Anyway, what’s done is done, and I’ve already committed to this experiment by sticking my name on this. I might as well see it through, at least until interesting consequences begin to come into play.

The idea of running and writing a blog is kind of terrifying to me, which must seem odd to anyone who knows me even a smidge. I have something of a reputation for shameless self-promotion and and having absolutely nothing in the way of a brain-to-mouth filter. You’d think this would have been easier, and earlier in coming.

I think that I was comfortable in the anonymity afforded by ubiquitous online platforms. My Facebook account is poorly-trafficked, and I’m not on Twitter or anything, which means I get to make outrageous statements in the pseudo-safe assumption that nobody who doesn’t need to see it will see it. On the other hand, there’s something almost frontier-sy about starting my own blog, with a name I came up with myself. Maybe because I don’t read enough blogs. But I’d like to think that it has something to do with taking that tiny little bit more control into your own hands, and saying, “my Facebook stuff might ultimately belong to Zuckerberg, but this blog belongs to me.”

It’s a standing-up, it’s a singling-out, and it’s hopefully something I’m not going to regret.

Like this:

Related

Post navigation

2 thoughts on “Immoveable Type”

Welcome to the blogosphere. My dinosaur self started blogging last summer and it has been a wonderful experience. Who knew there were people all around the world wanting to interact and learn. Best of luck !